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Difference between Ann Arbor and Dearborn campus?

I regretfully screwed up my hs GPA because I took too many AP/honors classes, so I'll definitely be rejected from the AA campus. I live 15 minutes from the Dearborn campus, so I'm going there. After a year or two I want to transfer to the Ann Arbor campus (if possible).

I want to study CS. What will happen to my job prospects? Could I still find jobs with decent salaries? Any here in Michigan?

Replies to: Difference between Ann Arbor and Dearborn campus?

I know there's a 2+2 engineering program. Idk about CS. I personally would go to State or any other real college instead of a commuter school, and then transfer. Transferring won't matter, you'll still have the same prospects any other Ann Arbor junior or senior has. Good luck!

This post comes up pretty often and I always recommend the same thing.

Go to WCC, knock out as much of the general required classes as you can, and transfer. WCC has some programming classes (it's not really "computer science" but helpful nonetheless) and apparently they're pretty legit. Much better than you would normally expect from a CC.

You will probably get a job coming out of Dearborn, but I'd guess at more like 45-55K rather than pretty commonly 100K+ coming out from Ann Arbor. The high prestige companies are not going to recruit at Dearborn.

Vlad failed to mention something important. Attending Dearborn has one distinct advantage: every single class transfers, and your GPA carries over upon admittance (I was incredibly shocked to find that upon matriculation I actually maintained the same GPA that I had at Dearborn). Moreover, most of the introductory courses actually share the same catalogue numbers (i.e. Math 115, 116, 215, 217 are all equal to their Ann Arbor equivalents and are considerably less difficult).

Of course, Dearborn certainly does have some drawbacks. Despite recent attempts at transforming itself into a traditional campus -- the regents recently approved and built campus housing -- the school is absolutely devoid of culture. There is a certain smallness to it that it just can't escape. In addition, there is a very homogenous Arab culture that makes up a large minority of the students. This would not typically be a bad thing, but they tend to be incredibly insular in nature, and as a result you can at times feel like an island.

Nonetheless, I don't know how these qualities compare or contrast with attending Community College. I would like to believe it's just as bad if not worse.

Note: At orientation I encountered an overwhelming amount of students transferring from Flint/Dearborn -- more so than any of the community college transfers combined. To make the argument that admissions looks favorably on satellite campus transfers might be erroneous, but there certainly seemed to be a correlation.

Thank you, e130478 for saying what I would have followed up with to RJKofNovi. Dearborn is a COMMUTER school, with minimal if any admissions standards. State or Hillsdale or Hope are real colleges, in that all freshmen live on campus, there is a college atmosphere and there are some admissions standards. If you want to miss out on a freshman experience, go ahead and attend a CC or a commuter school like UMD. I don't see why anyone just shy of UM-AA would ever want to miss out on that experience, but maybe that's just me. I would never consider living at home to go to Dearborn, it would be like 13 and 14th grade of high school to me, while most of my friends were off having fun in East Lansing or Ann Arbor.

There are some pros, like the 2+2 programs and everything matching up. But as long as you pay attention to transfer equivalency lists, or call admissions if there are any concerns about your schedule, I don't see why that would be a major draw to attending a satellite. Now if money is tight, I can understand not wanting to take out loans for 2 years of living expenses, and I would perhaps consider the closest commuter school to home.

It is true that you may get all the credits transferred from UM Dearborn, however, it is a lot more expensive than getting those credits from WCC or any other community colleges. You may end up paying double the cost per credit at UM Dearborn if that is your major concern. The key thing is to get good grades particularly on the classes that can give you transferable credits.

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